Authors: Gurmeet Kaur, Assistant Professor Mr. Jagbir Grewal
Abstract: Digital education has expanded rapidly across Indian schooling in recent years, yet its distribution across rural and urban settings remains markedly uneven. The present paper reports the findings of a study undertaken to compare the access to, utilisation of, and attitude toward digital education among rural and urban secondary school students of Yamuna Nagar district, Haryana, and to examine whether the two localities differ significantly on access, device availability, internet connectivity, teacher digital competency, and attitude. A sample of one hundred Class 9 and 10 students was drawn through stratified random sampling from six secondary schools, balanced across locality (50 rural, 50 urban). Data were gathered using the Digital Education Accessibility Scale, adapted from Rani and Thakur (2020), and analysed using Pearson's correlation and the independent-samples t-test at the 0.05 level of significance. Results showed urban students scoring significantly higher on all five dimensions tested, a strong positive correlation between Access and Utilisation scores, and a near-categorical rather than gradual divide in Access between the two localities. The paper discusses these findings in the light of existing research and offers implications for teachers, schools, and policy planners.
